A stranger in a foreign land?

The inner sense of being a "stranger in a foreign land" is a recurring spiritual and cultural trope. "This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through," went the old song. It latched on to a more or less universal experience. "I feel like I don't belong." It happens in families, in organizations, and in physical and cultural spaces. It happens when we move from one place to another, from one culture to another. It occurs in the deep psychological place where we sense we were made for something different, made for somewhere else. 
The feeling is accompanied by a longing to find a place of belonging, and in the belonging to find peace, and so to lose the restlessness of the alien. St. Augustine wrote in the opening invocation in his Confessions "our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee,"* pointing to the end of restlessness in unity with the divine. For Augustine human beings were not self-sufficient, and hence always desire something outside themselves. Human life is always a "not yet." A desire and craving is satisfied for only a short time before another arises. In this life, for Augustine, we are condemned to pursue the Other, yet never to achieve perfect union. Hence the restlessness, the feeling of being a stranger here, but made for somewhere else. My reading of Augustine is that perfect union, the finding of the heart's true home, is in the life to come. Of course, we have no way of testing whether Augustine was right or wrong. But for good or ill, and likely not all the time, but certainly some off the time, we know the restlessness of being "a stranger in a foreign land."
Long ago, the ancient Jewish people had been taken by King Nebuchadnezzer into exile. They had moved from Jerusalem to Babylon. The prophet Jeremiah advised the exiles, "Build houses and live in them ... seek the welfare of the city where [the Lord has] sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find welfare" (Jer. 29:5-7). A different perspective. Exiled for sure, and, with exile the feelings of strangeness, of not belonging, of being restless. Yet Jeremiah advised them not to mope, not to despair, but to make the best of exile; to go on with the ordinary things of life, to seek the well-being of all regardless of where they found themselves. And then, in the midst of exile they would find prosperity.
As strangers in a foreign land, are restlessness and prosperity mutually exclusive? Can they be kin under the same roof? I'll think about it a while.

+Ab. Andy

*The Confessions of Saint Augustine, translated by E. B. Pusey, Mount Vernon: Peter Pauper Press, 1838, 9.